The Whole Town Underwater, Part 3

The day my father buried the remains of Mr. Aptowicz’s wife, people came out to our house to see the ceremony. I don’t know how they found out. I suppose Mr. Aptowicz must have made his intentions clear somehow. People arrived on bikes and on foot. They said hello to Mr. Aptowicz, who had become a local celebrity, but they seemed guilty in the presence of my father. Lapsed churchgoers were discovered.

My father went between the people, patting them on the back, as friendly as I’d ever seen him. His eyes showed heavy wrinkles around his smile.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said. “Nice to see you. Billy, Helen, nice to see you. Welcome everyone.”

I wondered if he would put his vestments on, but I was disappointed and a little relieved to see him in khakis and a blue shirt, matching the open sky above him.

We all helped dig a grave, puffing under the spring sun. It didn’t need to be large, we knew, but we wanted to make it look like a real funeral, and not something placed unceremoniously in the ground.

When we were finished Mr Aptowicz came forward shyly, his face bowed, and fell on his knees. He reached down into the grave and placed the white urn in the dirt. A sigh went through the crowd and a breeze started up, cooling everyone.

My father stood at the head of the grave and paused. He made his hands into fists and placed them on his lips, thinking.

“I thought I would read from the Scriptures today,” he told the gathered people. “But somehow I couldn’t find the right sort of passage. I know stories that fit, and things that could be said, but when I tried them out last night, listening to the words, they seemed to come out wrong, half-hearted. And I know this occasion calls for something, something correct.”

He paused again and took a deep breath. My father had gotten thin in those lean years; we had all gotten thin. His hair was falling out. He looked like he could sleep for years, that he needed to, for his own good.

“Mr Aptowicz came here a stranger,” he continued. “He will not leave here a stranger. We have given him a place to bury his dead.”

People murmured their agreement. I looked at Mr. Aptowicz, who probably didn’t understand. For the whole last two days he had sat in our living room, lost in his own thoughts. He put his white urn on the living room table and watched it.  When I eyed it, curious, he pointed at the urn and nodded.  I picked it up; it was strangely heavy, like his wife had been a tiny woman who they had placed bodily inside.

My father looked at the grave opening up beneath him.

“I wondered to myself, last night, trying to find words to say today. I thought: who has seen the dead buried? We have seen them in ones and twos, but we can never imagine the whole host, spread out before our eyes, all at once. The names call, the bodies are buried below our feet. What can anyone say about that? How could anyone deny one more, among their midst?”

I looked out over the crowd. They were staring at my father in confused sadness. He was going somewhere they didn’t want to follow. But they stood and listened.

“We will inter this body in the earth, where it belongs,” my father said. “There are no words for the process. But we are gathered to engage in this simple ceremony, and we need words as surely as we need spades to move the earth. So I will say this, to all of you. We do this in an effort to understand, in one glimpse, the speech of a whole host of people who are now invisible. During this burial, we listen to one voice, the departed voice, and no more. We cannot have it otherwise. We cannot listen to anything more, because we do not want to bury ourselves. Because we want to be alive.”

Everyone took a single breath, like a movement of wind, a wave through the people.

“And though I don’t know if it fits, or merits saying, I will tell you that these are the last words I will ever say over this cemetery,” my father told us. “I am going away from this place, and I don’t think I will ever return. I leave the church to the congregation. You are all good people, and you can decide your own relationship with God.”

My father went over to the doors of the church and, taking out his key, undid the padlock. Then he walked back to Mr. Aptowicz, shook his hand, and went inside. The sound of the door slamming echoed in the sudden silence.

Everyone stood around and waited to see if anything would happen. When nothing did, Burt Gibbons lumbered up to the side of the grave, picked up a shovel, and started moving the dirt. After a while I did too. We worked at it until the dirt was packed in. I was sweating; the sun was high in the sky.

When I looked up from digging, there were only a few people left. They looked at the church but they didn’t go up to it. They began to filter off, in twos and threes, until it was just me, leaning against the sycamore, looking at the grave. Murmuring thanks to no one in particular, Mr. Aptowicz went to his car, got in, and sat there for a long time.

 

That night, while my father was sleeping, I went out into the night air and walked around the cemetery, trying to get the nerve up. The stones were quiet. The trees moved a little. I walked around the graves in circles, looking up at the windows where the two old men were sleeping, until I felt ready.

I opened the back door of the church. I knew where the key was kept, in a hole in the brick, left of the door. I had been in there once or twice already. I knew how to get in.

Once I was inside I turned on the little lamp, and all at once the room appeared. The light reflected off of the spines of the Great Library Series volumes, off of the windows, but mostly off of the pictures that lined the walls and even the floor. The only bare space free of glass was a little path that led to the center of the room, to a large table with a book open in the center. They took the light like mirrors, framing secondary lights that made the room seem twice as large as it actually was. The pictures themselves were obscure, hidden in the glare, so that I had to look closer to really see them.

They were all pictures of my mother. Alone, with me, with me and my father. Reading, laughing, lying on the couch. Pictures of her in church, pictures of her walking down a long road with leaves falling, and cars on either side, moving away. You couldn’t escape here face, anywhere you looked.

I walked to the center, past college photos, photos of bathtubs, washing me, cloudy days with no rain, childhood pictures of someone who must have been my mother, someone I had never seen. I picked my way through that cluster of mute faces.

I opened the book. I wasn’t surprised, I had seen it before, but I saw there was fresh ink on the pages. He had never stopped writing. My father had treated the pages of those books, those old American Library Collections, to look like new paper, and had written over them in whatever ink he could find: here blue, here red, and then bold black in some places. In some places you could see the old type, faintly, beneath his script. Palimpsests. Sometimes his hand seemed shaky, from rushing to get the words out, or from some emotion that set his hand trembling.

There were titles I knew well. Headings from the Scriptures, from Acts and Ruth and even the Epistles. I took other books off of the shelves and held them open to the light. The words were hard to read, but everywhere I could see my mother’s name, Molly, in the middle of sentences where she had never appeared before.

And David comforted Molly his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her.

And it came to pass that after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Molly.

This is what he was doing, or was done with. He had rewritten everything to contain my mother. She held me on the mountain and held a knife over me. My mother wandered in the desert. She was born and died a thousand times. The Lord never spoke to anyone but her, and she spoke sermons that no one else could ever have delivered, to the poor and the disfigured, speaking out of the darkness to those who were in sorrow. She wrote proverbs and psalms, and was the author and the subject of love songs. She cursed God, and spoke from the whirlwind. She came to redeem, and was taken away, leaving all of us to wait for the glorious day of her return.

As I read, I started to feel something creeping in the air, a presence forming in the dark corners. The reflected light, the mirroring frames, the air off the turning pages like slowly taken breath – hushed and haunted sights and sounds – they were all awaiting the visitation they had been built to contain.

I put the books back with shaky hands. I put everything back where I had found it, retreated, and locked it away.

 

The next day I walked my father to the car. Clouds had rolled in overnight, and it seemed like at any second the sky would open up. But it held off just long enough.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll drive until I have to stop, and then I’ll make a decision.”

I nodded.

“You’re staying?” he asked. It was only half a question.

I nodded again. He looked past me, up into the second floor window. Mr. Aptowicz was lying in bed, as he had all morning and into the early afternoon. He wouldn’t speak. He refused food and water. He lay with his hands folded over him and looked up at the ceiling.

“You’ll take care of him?” he asked me.

“Of course,” I said. “As best I can.”

“It might not take long,” he said, turning back to me. “People follow each other, sometimes.”

The words hung in the air.

“What will you do?” he asked me.

“I’m going to wait until he passes,” I said. “And then I’m going to find a place in town.”

“And here?” my father asked.

“I’m going to burn everything.” I set my mouth. “I’m going to burn it all.”

My father leaned back against the car. He was wearing sunglasses; I couldn’t see his eyes. But he was facing the church, and I think he was looking towards the back annex.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, yes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m going to leave the dead with the dead.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not it.” He clasped his hands. “I don’t know what it is.”

I tried to hold him, but he was limp in my hands. He leaned against the car and for a minute I wondered if he was ever going to move again. But he did. The wind stirred up and he stiffened, pushed away from me. He looked down the road the way you look at the sky when someone near you is crying.

“I’m going,” he said. “I’m going now.”

“Yeah,” I said. I stepped back onto the grass.

He took the old man’s car and went off down the road. I sat on the lawn like a child, plucking at dandelions, as I watched my father departing.